Hunger and malnutrition have devastating consequences for children. Federal nutrition programs continue to be a critical support to ensure children's daily nutritional needs are met: they put food on children's plates, help build healthy minds and bodies, and help lift families out of poverty.

Schools across the country have been working hard to implement updated nutrition guidelines for school meals. There are challenges, but schools' efforts are paying off. If you don't think school meals can be healthy and appealing, take a look at these school lunches.

Let me say up front that if my own kids' home-packed lunches were inspected by a school or government official, I'd be quite ticked off. But at the same time, these sorts of incidents just don't fill me with the horror or outrage that so many have expressed in the blogosphere.

Here's what we've learned after 12 years of doing Mix: When students interact with those who are different from them, biases and mis-perceptions can fall away. That sounds like a good goal for all of us, including our elected representatives.

It's a mere few weeks into the school year and I'm already dreading lunch. What's more stressful is a tossup: the caffeine-enhanced frenzy of packing lunches at the crack of dawn or the frustration of opening my daughter's lunchbox at the end of a long school day to find it completely untouched.

As parents, we need to be aware of how we talk about food and what others are eating in front of our children. We need to model kindness and not judgment, whether it's about eating not enough vegetables or too many vegetables.

My students often remark on a 'weird' smell that comes from our vermicomposting bin in the classroom. A slightly "earthy" smell is produced as the worms break down fruits, vegetables, and starches into fertilizer that contains readily available phosphorous.